What do people do online?
Using data donation to understand digital behavior.
a workshop at the SPP Junior Researcher Meeting
October 22, 2025
The participant’s perspective.
👉 Solution: Platforms offer data download packages (DDPs), which users can request and download to inspect data.
👉 Consequence: Researchers uses DDPs as part of user-centric data donation studies.
🤔 Please raise your hand ✋
(Before a week ago…) Who has ever tried to request their data from an online platform?
💡 Definition: Data donation studies are a user-centric method for collecting digital traces.
For platforms like YouTube, Instagram, or LinkedIn, for example… (Hase et al. 2024)
Compared to APIs (Ohme et al. 2024)…
👉 but can be burdensome for participants!
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| Survey | Request & Download Data | Extract Data | Inspect Data | Consent |
🤔 How easy (or hard) did you find it to request your data? Did you encounter any obstacles?
Survey start page
Different degrees in standardization for data requests (Hase et al. 2024)…
Request manual for LinkedIn on computer
Request manual for Instagram on computer
Data overview on data donation platform
📢 Task: Try it yourself.
You might have already requested and downloaded your data in preparation for today.
Did you encounter any difficulties in sharing your data?
🤔 Questions?
Data Donation Workshop - Frieder & Sebastian